India's Best colleges

For those who have followed the INDIA TODAY-Nielsen Survey of India's Best Colleges since it first began in 1997, the identities of the top ranked colleges in each of our six subject streams will perhaps come as no surprise.

For those who have followed the INDIA TODAY-Nielsen Survey of India's Best Colleges since it first began in 1997, the identities of the topranked colleges in each of our six subject streams will perhaps come as no surprise.

The battle for the top 10 ranks is usually fought by the same group of colleges, with only an occasional gatecrasher spoiling the game of musical chairs played by the elite.

The continued domination of a select few institutions is not necessarily a bad thing. Higher education needs a dose of institutional elitism as separate from an elitism that denies equal opportunity and access.

Becoming a member of an elite club should become an aspirational goal for those on the outside. The insiders must strive to improve to maintain their status. That motivates the pursuit of excellence in the system as a whole. That is what leads to academic excellence.

Catching up with the best requires time, not least because it takes much longer to acquire a reputation than to actually construct the physical infrastructure on par with the best. Some of India's finest colleges like St. Stephen's, Delhi; Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi; Presidency College, Kolkata; and Loyola College, Chennai were set up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Their creaking infrastructure may not compete with what a new private university can offer, but their reputations precede the buildings, libraries and broadband.

Reputations formed over long periods of time matter not just in India. Oxford and Cambridge have continued to be the preferred destinations of British undergraduates for eight centuries. Harvard has been the top choice of American undergraduates for almost four centuries. But there is a difference.

In the US and the UK, the elitism of Oxbridge and Harvard prompted other institutions to rise to the challenge and compete-the LSE for example or the MIT and Stanford; there are many more, less famous names which provide comparable education without the brand. In India, there has been stagnation.

It should not be that way. There is plenty of room for many more institutions of excellence. In 2011, only 15 per cent of those Indians who complete secondary school will actually enroll in a college for higher education. The global average is close to 25 per cent; in advanced economies it is close to 50 per cent.

The country doesn't seem to have enough quality higher education institutions to cater to the demands of even this 15 per cent, never mind the 85 per cent who are yet to demand it. In the 2011 IIT-JEE, five lakh students competed for just over 9,600 seats. Out of every 50 students that appeared for the IIT-JEE, 49 competed for engineering in-stitutes other than the IITs, BHU, Varanasi and Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad.

Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi

In Delhi University, the best colleges which feature in the top 10 of this survey closed admission with cutoffs ranging between 95 and 100 per cent. The demand for quality higher education far outstrips supply. Thousands of aspiring young students will head to third-rate universities in Australia and New Zealand because they have no choice.

The Government must take the lion's share of the blame for this unfortunate state of affairs. For too long, the Government dithered on allowing private participation in higher education- left to itself, it didn't have the necessary resources. When it finally did allow private entry, it failed to ensure that the necessary regulatory setups were in place to ensure high standards. In many cases new institutions, improperly regulated, have actually ended up lowering the standards of the system as a whole.

The one exception to the trend of stagnation and decline has been in legal education, visible in our rankings over time. At least three law colleges which feature in our top 10 this year did not exist at the time of our first stream-based rankings in 1998.

NALSAR, Hyderabad, this year's top-ranked law school was set up in 1998. National Law Institute of India, Bhopal, was set up in 1997 and the West Bengal National University of Judicial Sciences was set up in 1999.

SRCC, Delhi

All three set out to fill the gap between demand and supply for high quality legal education straight out of school- most university faculties offered law as postgraduate degree. All three wanted to emulate the success of the National Law School, Bangalore that had been set up in 1988. On the basis of quantifiable factual data, all three rank higher than NLS in Bangalore.

This reflects the relative ease of building first class infrastructure. On perception the journey can be longer. But NALSAR has, in a short span, beaten NLS in terms of the perception of experts. These institutions of legal education should serve as a role model for colleges seeking to break through to the ranks of the elite. We may then witness a churn in the rankings and have more quality options for those leaving school.